Lawyers for Overstock.com on Friday withdrew a temporary restraining order they had won against a couple they have accused of stealing customer e-mail addresses from the company.
The temporary restraining order, or TRO as they are commonly called, required Rachelle and Jeffrey Knight, Salt Lake City, to turn over Overstock.com equipment and their personal computer and prevented them from selling or disclosing any addresses they may have taken.
The Knights' attorney, Lauren I. Scholnick, said substantively the withdrawal of the TRO means little, since she said the Knights never stole any addresses anyway and their computer already has been taken.
However, she said, she sees the development as "a huge admission" on Overstock.com's part.
But Overstock.com attorney Michael L. Larsen said the TRO simply was no longer needed. The Knights' computer had already been confiscated, and the attorneys on both sides have agreed to have the hard drive scanned and imaged, so the TRO has served its purpose, he said. And because a lawsuit has been filed, any destruction of evidence would bring severe penalties, with or without the TRO, Larsen said.
Larsen also said it was withdrawn because two Overstock.com employees, who said they had been using Overstock.com's computer system sometime in September and noticed Rachelle Knight logged in, changed some of the details of their story. They now say it happened sometime in the spring, Larsen said.
Scholnick pointed to the changes as significant, saying the plaintiffs would never have been able to obtain the TRO had the affidavits been accurate from the start.
But Larsen said that when the suit was first filed, the two employees had little time to work out the exact details of what they remembered. Since then, the employees had time to "do their homework" and come up with a more accurate recollection.
The suit, filed Dec. 5 in 3rd District Court, accuses the Knights of having logged into the company's computer network via remote access. In weeks running up to the suit, Overstock.com received "a significantly increased" number of patron complaints about junk e-mail, the suit says.
Many of those patrons set up separate e-mail accounts exclusively for Overstock.com use, according to the suit, pointing to the company's customer information bank as the source of their leak to advertisers.
The increase in e-mails led Overstock.com to investigate the matter, ultimately leading to the information about the Knights' alleged hacking, the suit says.
The Knights and Scholnick have strongly denied the accusations, saying they have no basis. Scholnick speculated the suit was nothing more than a publicity stunt to portray Overstock.com as aggressively fighting for customer privacy.
E-MAIL: dsmeath@desnews.com